mobile world congress - day 4 recap

MOBILE

2015

WORLD 4DAY

RECAPCONGRESS

DAY

4

1

“THE OTHERS”Farmers in third world countries see success over crops via mobile weather updates! Disease is halted due to SMS texting awareness in developing market! Oh these people, if only they know what the internet could do for them!

These are the types of headlines that saturate the media in which we form our opinions about developing markets and mobile penetration. Well, it’s wrong. What people don’t know is that when developing countries around the world see growth in internet and mobile usage, these users are immediately going straight to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and their local news sources. They are joining the global conversation immediately (faster than your gramps).

We need to stop thinking of these global citizens as “the others”. Because that 26 year old programmer in Kenya is going to be the one driving innovation in her country faster than the 26 year old programmer in Palo Alto making privileged assumptions.

2015 MOBILE WORLD CONGRES RECAP

DAY

4

2

ENABLING FINANCIAL INCLUSIONCash is not the friend of the excluded. If you receive cash for an hourly-waged job and you can’t pay a bill online, or send money home to mom, or perhaps your benefits are stolen on your commute home, how are you supposed to keep this physical money digitally secure?

Mobile banking helps solve this issue of cash-turned-digital transactions, but only if all the mobile banking silos around the world drop their act and... wait for it...become ubiquitous (the most overused word in 2015 so far, sorry!). A majority of speakers at MWC have placed a call to arms for the larger financial institutions of the world to embrace mobile banking systems so that a global money transfer hub can exist, one which allows for all types of financial transactions to take place regardless of phone, carrier, or financial provider.


DAY

4

3

HOW ARE YOU PAYING?According to PayPal, these are the four dominant mobile payment types:

REMOTE MOBILE PAYMENT: consumer is shopping in a native application or shopping digitally

MOBILE IN-STORE PAYMENTS: payment occurs in a physical store where the mobile device is used by a consumer to make a payment

MOBILE POINT OF SALE: geared towards smalls businesses who never accepted credit cards but are trying to find new ways to accept more payment forms (think Square)

HYBRID: consumer makes purchase on a mobile website for an item, but chooses to pick it up in a physical store versus shipping


DAY

44THE TRUST REVOLUTIONCEO of AVG Gary Kovacs believes that trust is the new currency. He also believes that it’s an inalienable human right in the mobile industry that’s under a tremendous threat. The industry needs to fundamentally change how it accesses and uses data. It can start by doing these three things:

1. The code to products we deliver must be simpler. We operate our lives across a series of operating systems and multiple platforms. It’s currently a mess to navigate and different rules apply.

2. The one page user-agreement challenge. Kovacs had his team look at all the privacy policies attached to his digital life. If he wanted to read them all, it would take nearly 76 days to get through all the fine print. What do all these companies possibly need?! Lets push for an industry standard of one-page user agreements with a size 12 font.

3. Expectations of user behavior. Kovacs and partners are pushing for #SMARTUSER education. If you don’t do it in real life, why do it online? The idea is if we make trust smart and simple, educating users how to behave will be just as easy.


DAY

4

5

WRONG PLACE ATTHE WRONG TIMEWhen you start to look back over time, there are a ton of ideas that failed in the digital and mobile space. Could it have been just an issue of wrong place, wrong time? A decade ago, was the mobile technology just not good enough for rating your college colleagues Hot Or Not to explode as a money generator? Because online dating app Tinder has the same foundation as Hot or Not (swipe right for hot, swipe left for not), it just exploded because of location services and social network growth.

So creatives, entrepreneurs, big idea thinkers, and marketers too, it might be worth taking a trip back down memory lane and determining what ideas failed miserably due to wrong timing that could thrive based on the progression of our mobile technologies.
